Ethics Quotes

Although profanity is part of our language that we speak everyday, it can simultaneity be used as a weapon to demoralize other people if it is offensive within its meaning.

~ Saaif Alam

Our fights must be rooted in experiences, in stories, and in anecdotes. People remember these more than sterile numbers or facts. Myths are powerful magic and can turn enemies into friends. In a world where too many still tell stories that some are illegal and that to be free we must control the movement of others, the work of making new myths is essential.

~ Syed Khalid Hussan

Audiences who behave obscene toward prominent people have no clue that their opinions can result others to have a bad impression on them.

~ Saaif Alam

We ought always to deal justly, not only with those who are just to us, but likewise to those who endeavor to injure us; and this, for fear lest by rendering them evil for evil, we should fall into the same vice.

~ Hierocles

Always polish the dirt for a refreshing start and seek out to build new mental structures that can help you to become rejuvenated.

~ Saaif Alam

Egoism holds, therefore, is that each man's happiness is the sole good--that a number of different things are each of them the only good thing there is--an absolute contradiction! No more complete and thorough refutation of any theory could be desired.

~ G.e. Moore

If i am asked 'what is good? my answer is that good is good, and that is the end of the matter. Or if I am asked 'How is good to be defined?' my answer is that it cannot be defined, and that is all I have to say about it

~ G.e. Moore

We Humanists behave as well as we can, without any expectation of rewards or punishments in an Afterlife. We serve as best we can the only abstraction with which we have any real familiarity, which is our community.

~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

When we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something or need something, not that it is a pragmatic necessity for us to have it, but that it is a moral imperative that we have it, then is when we join the fashionable madmen, and then is when the thin whine of hysteria is heard in the land, and then is when we are in bad trouble. And I suspect we are already there.

~ Joan Didion

...if good is defined as something else, it is then impossible either to prove that any other definition is wrong or even to deny such definition.

~ G.e. Moore

Good, then, is indefinable....

~ G.e. Moore

For it is the business of Ethics, I must insist, not only to obtain true results, but also to find valid reasons for them.

~ G.e. Moore

We must not, therefore, be frightened by the assertion that a thing is natural into the admission that it is good; good does not, by definition, mean anything that is natural; and it is therefore always an open question whether anything that is natural is good.

~ G.e. Moore

A person who has a criminal mind and would be punished by the referees and they will remain in isolation from others as an opportunity for them to reform. When he or she get released from his or her referees' custody, he or she would have a better understanding about the ethical and moral values of his or her society and not make the same mistake again.

~ Saaif Alam

If practicality and morality are polarized and you must choose, you must do what you think is right, rather than what you think is practical.

~ Philip K. Dick

I believe that we are henceforth incapable of returning to an order of moral life which would take the form of a simple submission to commandments or to an alien or supreme will, even if this will were represented as divine. We must accept as a positive good the critique of ethics and religion that has been undertaken by the school of suspicion. From it we have learned to understand that the commandment that gives death, not life, is a product and projection of our own weakness.

~ Paul Ricœur

The poison that is war does not free us from the ethics of responsibility. There are times when we must take this poison - just as a person with cancer accepts chemotherapy to live. We can not succumb to despair. Force is and I suspect always will be part of the human condition. There are times when the force wielded by one immoral faction must be countered by a faction that, while never moral, is perhaps less immoral. We in the industrialized world bear responsibility for the world’s genocides because we had the power to intervene and did not. We stood by and watched the slaughter in Chechnya, Sri Lanka, Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Rwanda where a million people died. The blood for the victims of Srebrenica- a designated UN safe area in Bosnia- is on our hands. The generation before mine watched, with much the same passivity, the genocides of Germany, Poland, Hungary, Greece, and the Ukraine. These slaughters were, as in, Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s book Chronical of a Death Foretold, often announced in advance

~ Chris Hedges

You lie and kill in the service of liars and killers. You pretend to be separate, to have your own code, something that makes up for the horrors. But they are part of you. And they will never go away.

~ Loki

[W]e must start from somewhere in current folk morality, otherwise we start from somewhere unintuitive, and that can hardly be a good place to start

~ Frank Jackson

He would have been careful not to violate his conscience in any way that might keep him from devoting his full attention to the sin he had decided to commit. Pedro was not really very different from all men, at least in that. Not very different from the bank teller who makes sure to give every customer exact change, even while he is embezzling.

~ Warren Eyster

The essence of the spiritual process needs to be understood as a means to generate the necessary intensity to break the bubble, so that you are out of your individual nature. It is not about being good, it is not about being ethical, it is not about being moral. These things may all happen as a result, as a consequence. Once you have broken the bubble and known the freedom of experiencing everything as yourself, as a consequence you may function as a good person in society. But you have no particular intention of being good!

~ Sadhguru

All the social ills thatlaw presumes to correct exist because people are not free tolearn and grow.

~ Jeremy Locke

Economics without ethics is a caricature. Ethics without economics is a fairy tale.

~ Jakub Bożydar Wiśniewski

It is only when one is under extreme duress that one's true character is revealed.

~ Christopher Earle

This is biblical ethics. It has little to do with the middle-class ethics of avoiding a few things which are supposed to be wrong and doing a few things which are supposed to be right. Biblical ethics means standing in ultimate decisions for or against God.

~ Paul Tillich

One thing, Ms. Gray, is forgotten by this tragedy: the embryo is human, not a nonhuman as the Supreme Court declared. Abortion never was about the poor or about women’s rights. It’s an ideology with an agenda—and it’s a profitable business. So, Ms. Gray, I dare say few politicians will speak that truth for fear of political reprisals. I’m not afraid. Politicians and courts made legal what is a morally reprehensible act of brutality. I call it what it is: judicial tyranny.

~ J.w. Brazier

What was it about us, as humans, that drove us to make apologies for beautiful things?

~ Nenia Campbell

All laws which can be violated without doing any one any injury are laughed at. Nay, so far are they from doing anything to control the desires and passions of men that, on the contrary, they direct and incite men's thoughts the more toward those very objects, for we always strive toward what is forbidden and desire the things we are not allowed to have. And men of leisure are never deficient in the ingenuity needed to enable them to outwit laws framed to regulate things which cannot be entirely forbidden... He who tries to determine everything by law will foment crime rather than lessen it.

~ Baruch Spinoza

We'd do well to remember that at the end of the day, the law doesn't defend us; we defend the law. And when it becomes contrary to our morals, we have both the right and the responsibility to rebalance it toward just ends.

~ Edward Snowden

All lines are gray in the dark.

~ Nenia Campbell

Day and NightThe night is long: do not shorten it by sleep. The day is fair: do not darken it with wrongdoing.

~ Idries Shah

Some people that are in charge are usually less intelligent than the people who work under them. The reason why those people are in charge and you aren’t is because you have a conscience.

~ Heather Chapple

Right isn't always legal.

~ J.s.b. Morse

It's not doing what is right that's hard for a President. It's knowing what is right.

~ Lyndon Johnson

Bullying is an attack upon the runts of the litter - the weak of the species, and it is predicated on a lack of bond with the parents. If a child has a secure bond with the parents, that forms a force-field around the child in terms of bullying. If the child does not have a strong bond with the parents, then it's like being separated from the herd - those are the ones who get picked off by the human predators in childhood and adulthood. So keep your contacts as close as you can, they provide an amazing shield against bullies and users.

~ Stefan Molyneux

You believe stealing is wrong, but if your family was starving and could not afford bread, wouldn't you say it’s okay to steal a loaf to feed them?

~ A.j. Darkholme

We stay the same as we've always been, keeping to the path we've walked our whole lives. Paths that carry so much importance and perceived stability that we are utterly convinced it is the only one to walk – that anyone not walking it with us is being misled.

~ A.j. Darkholme

If someone was going to kill someone dear to you, and you could stop that person by killing them instead, would you kill them, knowing it was an effective way to save your loved one?

~ A.j. Darkholme

What good does it do to tell somebody to live morally so they can die 50 years later and apparently go to Hell?

~ Donald Miller

To paraphrase Lucretius, there's nothing more useful than to watch a man or woman in times of contagious deadly disease peril combined with his or her assumptions of financial adversity to discern what kind of man or woman they really are.

~ T.k. Naliaka